Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...invites easy comparisons. There is a tape-erasing scene (David's awakening has been recorded); though the Nixon tapes are not mentioned, the point is obvious. Operatic comparisons are also in order. The Hero is a reverse twist on Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, that maudlin, heavy-handed tale about the impersonation of a dead man in bed. Most of Menotti's music is passable Puccini: melodic, easy to take - and totally beside the point...
Another brief calm ensued until two weeks ago, when Bessell, hounded by British reporters at his home in California, undermined most of the Thorpe defense. He admitted that his blackmail tale had been a "coverup ... to prevent Scott from standing up in court and making statements about Jeremy. The whole idea was to make Scott shut his mouth...
...incongruous styles--the sports parody and the surrealist fantasy. Gray does manage to unify the two, yet connections between the styles go no deeper than the surface. Gray always seems to have a well-conceived them in mind, as is evident in "Passing Through" and in "Re-entry," the tale of a stranger in a fantasy world. In neither instance, however, does she bind the theme to imaginings beyond deliberate thought...
...phenomenon called the gangplank complex explains why what was almost a capitalist fairy tale has had a predictable ending. This complex works strange effects on recent entrants to the ruling class. Once they make it on to the ship of state or of class, they try their hardest to pull in the gangplank to success along with them. As McDonald's reached Fortune 500 status in the late 60's, it turned its back on its entrepreneurial origins. Kroc had touted the franchising scheme, for instance, as a kind of popularization of big business, an opportunity to return...
Benchley doles out this tale in the standard measures of escapist fiction: ever escalating shocks at predictable intervals. Early on, the effect can be ludicrous: Will David get stuck in an elevator? Will his wife accidentally drink a glass of hydrochloric acid? What is the meaning of her mysterious nosebleed? Later the blood flows everywhere and the sea is awash with gore: "The moray struck, needle teeth fastening on the man's neck, throat convulsing as it pulled back toward the hole. Blood billowed out of the sides of the moray's mouth." That moray eel, which figures...